[dmhouse]

Yes and no. When I first started off with Emacs, I used the CUA bindings (Windows-esque bindings for C-x/C-v/C-c). That was great to begin with, but inevitably a change of settings as big as CUA never quite sat right with the rest of Emacs, and prevented me from really moving on. After a while I declared cua-mode to be a crutch that was holding me back, disabled it, and I'm extremely glad I did.

More recently I've moved mostly away from the arrow-keys navigation (not just up/down/left/right instead of n/p/b/f but Home End instead of C-a, C-e; C-left, C-right instead of M-b, M-f; C-up, C-down instead of M-{, M-}; C-Home, C-End instead of M-< and M->, etc.) to the more central commands. This is less of a win but has nonetheless sped up my editing still further.